jeffcroft.com
All Adobe products gradually became classical bloatware over the past years. One or two minor features, or otherwise just a couple of crappy-buzzword-features and you get a binary twice as bigger as the previous one.
When you realize they are doing that just because they need to improve sales, you feel betrayed. So honestly, today I feel betrayed by Adobe and I'm going to dump Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat for something else, forever. Amen.
Most advanced features of Photoshop, are better left to the professional designers. If you are using them, then you probably are wasting too much time prototyping.
Fireworks (or Gimp, or paint.net), or Visio are good enough.
I will be curious to see how lean the product stays when as the updates continue to roll in.
Photoshop CS3 was a nice improvement because it was a universal binary, but I doubt i will be upgrading to CS4 when it is released.
I'm curious about how slow people feel Photoshop is; it works really quickly for me doing web-based stuff at 1 or 2 megapixels. Does it slow down working with 90 megapixel 300dpi images?
Often, it's very simple subtle things that improve my workflow, like layer folders or improved styles or non-destructive layers.
People that have been using it just for a while, and used a lot of other tools, can give a more balanced opinion to it.
For me, I have CS2 in my computer, and I almost never use it. Fireworks has been enough for %90 of my needs.
Omnigraffle and Visio both have great stencils for wireframing forms, buttons, and different UI elements.
Between Yahoo's stencils (and some of my own), I can get some clear ideas in play that look like a web page in Photoshop in an hour or two, assuming I don't get tempted by pixel-perfection. This is slower than sketching, but I think just about always causes the audience to consider the prototype more thoroughly, uncovering problems and potential that a sketch usually won't.
Rails is fast, but it's still cheaper to tweak a Photoshop doc with your team looking over your shoulder.
I will usually get to a stable design, and then bring the whole team in and put the design up on the projector. We then discuss, critique, and dissect the design. The whole time, I can rapidly make new versions and forks of the design based on suggestions. This is just something that you can't do in HTML/CSS, at least not in realtime.
There's just something about HTML/CSS that constrains you to think in a box. With Illustrator or some other design tool, it's easier to get your ideas out. For me, getting to a pixel perfect design after planning in Illustrator is trivial.
The hard part is getting the actual design down.
I think this whole thread has too many hackers that are either scared of using design tools like Photoshop, against them because they are expensive or bloated, or deem them unnecessary because HTML/CSS is "good enough". I guarantee you that I'm able to iterate on designs faster and more efficiently using design tools rather than hand coding.
the easiest way to stumble into a wrong approach is to blindly adopt somebody else's approach without tailoring it to the particulars of how YOU work and think.
They're constantly in the press, they generate conversations on sites like this, and they've spawned a legion of (number)(noun) imitators. It's one of the basic principles of copywriting and social media marketing that it pays to be bold and occasionally controversial.
It's that old, "it nobody hates you, you aren't doing anything worthwhile".